This post is a tad late, but our internet at home has been on the fritz on account of water in the coax lines.

I flew down to Del Mar on Thanksgiving Thursday morning and spent a relaxing day at Rand’s.  Here’s a turkey:

And here’s some homemade cranberry sauce (no canned stuff) in some sunlight.

On Saturday, Tam, Al and I went to Mitsuwa for the annual tuna demo where they broke down four ~700lb bluefin tuna through out weekend.

(Update: One commenter mentioned that bluefin is becoming increasingly endangered, which is very true.  The Monterey Bay Aqaurium has some excellent guides on how to eat sushi and fish in a sustainable manner.  Bluefin is unfortunately on the “avoid” list.)

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Here is the tuna.  It’s a 700lb bluefin tuna caught off the coast of Malta in the Mediterranean.  After being cleaned, the carcass weighed about 500 lbs.  The performance was very crowded…4 to 5 people deep around the demonstration pit.

No trip (… a 35 minute trek from the East Village to Port Authority, 20 minutes waiting for the shuttle in bus exhaust and 30 minutes on a crowded shuttle ride to Jersey) to Mitsuwa is complete without having a meal or two at the food court.

Uber sushi chef Nobuyoshi-san positions himself for the first cut.

With the “loin” removed.

The remaining meat on the ribs was scraped off with a spoon and packaged for sale.  Very little of the fish went to waste.  The quality of the scrapings isn’t sashimi grade, but we speculated that it might be good broiled, in a soup or as burger patties.

This is chu-toro, or loin.  We ended up getting a combination of chu-toro and o-toro.  O-toro is belly or fatty meat.  It was the most decadent, oily toro I’ve ever had.  It was awesome…and at $62/lb (event sale price), you better believe it was awesome.

Removing the back bone.

We made friends with one of the nice fellows who was packaging up trays of toro.  He first hooked us up with increasingly better pieces of o-toro, swapping our inferior pieces out with nicer ones as he saw them go by.  Then he asks, “hey, you want the bone?”  “Uhhhh….sure!”  “Five dollars,” he says.  Wait five dollars a lb?  That thing is probably pretty heavy–no thanks.  “Two dollars!” he says…for the whole thing!  Sold!  We’ll take it!

We ended up buying the vertebrae of the 700lb fish for $2.  They hacked it apart with a cleaver and mallet into one foot sections and triple bagged it in black garbage bags. We picked up other accoutrement like fresh wasabi root, soy sauce and tsukemono.

On the way out, the sky was an eerie purplish-pink hue–like the light of a really great sunset defused through a layer of storm clouds.

Back at the apartment, we took pictures with our bounty and Tam did some Nate Hill poses.

Al broiled a section of the vertebrae then broke it down and made a simple soup from it.  In between each vertebrae there was a golf ball sized amount of synovial or spinal fluid ripe for the takin’ (the white stuff in the middle).  The fluid wasn’t very tasty.

We gorged ourselves on o-toro, rice, picked stuff and soup.  Mmmmm! I love food adventures…this kinda reminds me ‘eating a still-beating cobra heart.’

Here’s a follow up post with some alive tuna.

I’m going to get back into the swing of things. Large hocks of meat (picnic in this case), lots of cooking.

Romanesco broccoli from the Union Square green market.  The taste was somewhere around broccoflower but with a really nice texture…less stringy than broccoli, more fun to eat. Some affectionately call this “fractal broccoli” as it follows an approximate logarithmic spiral.

I bought a bunch of bananas from the friendly fruit cart guy near the Astor Kmart. I leave them on my desk at work.  First they attract senior management.  Then they attract fruit flies.

They have lots of potassium.

Went to Moto with a few food blogger friends. They have a wondrous baked apple pancake topped with creme fraiche. It’s more of an awesome buttery skillet cake than a pankcake. They also have a great date cake.

I recently procured a fabulous dutch oven (laugh all you want, my office did), and have been making all sorts of goodness with it. By the recommendation of a feller I met in vegas, I decided to try Cook’s Illustrated’s way too easy no knead bread (a 2.0 version of the original NY Times recipe). Well, it looks awesome, but it’s foolish to expect perfection on the first try, and unsurprisingly, I received not perfection but a dense, inadequately risen loaf of fresh bread. Note for next time: mix yeast in better, allow more time to rise.

Made carrot cake with Paula over the weekend. Mind-blowingly good.

A while ago I stumbled across this beef jerky shop in Chinatown. On the outside, there is a large sign that tells what types of jerky they have. It reads something like signs in the picture. Inside, there is a woman behind an (indoor) charcoal grill smoking slices and a glass case with lots of freshly grilled meats.The stuff is amazing. I’m told this is similar to Taiwan-style beef jerky. It’s sweet but rich and has an intense charcoal flavor, that you won’t find with any store-bought jerky. It’s not tough or chewy and goes great with Hitachino.

Just a quick one. Pastries in Chinatown. To do this week: Grocery shopping in Chinatown.

I’ve always had a penchant for yard work and gardening. I grew up taking care of a 1/3 acre yard of shurbs, bushes, fruit trees and weeds. I think I did 6 hours of watering a week. I’m very proficient with lopping shears and a 5HP chipper shredder. I bought a spade headed shovel and a rake in college just to do some yard work around our rented duplex.

So it comes as no suprise that I need some sort of contact with plant life to balance out the urban fever. I have an indoor bonsai I bought online and had shipped UPS 2-day. I now also have an herb garden…well what will eventually be an herb garden–scallions, thyme, rosemary, mint and *hopefully* Thai basil. Yahooo.

Mentai salmon. Makes a great brown bagger. Just add rice (and maybe a little furikake or goma).

I made fresh noodles last night. This photo is from a little while back but it illustrates the scene pretty well. They suggest hanging your pasta to dry so that you can store it and cook it later. However, I wouldn’t recommend leaving fresh dried pasta out as I think the raw egg pasta gave me food poisoning. Cook fresh pasta right away or store it by freezing it.

Here’s a blood orange I ate.

I was able to get ajaxy commenting working it its most primitive state. Still need to do some clean up of styles and fix navigation. 2:30am on a school night? Uh oh.

Oh boy, street meat is good. Legend has it that the halal cart at 53rd and 6th is the best in the city. People will line up down the block at all hours just to get a plate of rice, lettuce and lamb or chicken.

The truth is that it’s not that good. I’ve repeatedly gotten food poisoning from it…nothing serious, but the kind of feverish-I-shouldn’t-have-eaten-that-dirty-food sort of discontentedness…and I like to think of myself as having a pretty strong stomach, having eaten dirty street food all over Asia.

So if 53rd and 6th is no good, who is? Well, there’s a guy/cart, one block from my work at Beaver St. and Broadway. He’s one of the happiest street vendors I’ve ever met and his food is fresher and better tasting the rest. He makes each order individually–the whole time smiling and joking around. He recently got a new type of sauce, dubbed “blue sauce.” Check out the video, you’ll see what I mean.

Dragonfruit, C-town.