I like to make a whole roast chicken every few weeks. It makes for ridiculously juicy breast meat and provides a great carcass for making stock. I like to buy my meat in Chinatown because it’s way cheaper than Whole Foods. However, the chicken in Chinatown comes with some extras you don’t normally find. Also, there’s definitely no organic or free range certification and the meat tastes a bit gamier.
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 break down four ~700lb bluefin tunas throughout the 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. Here’s a follow up post with some alive tuna.)
Here's 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 to Mitsuwa is complete without having a meal or two at the food court. This trip was especially arduous: a 35 minute trek from the East Village to Port Authority, 20 minutes waiting for the Mitsuwa shuttle in bus exhaust and 35 minutes on a crowded shuttle ride to Jersey. One hour and forty minutes.
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. First, he 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 pound? 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 of ‘eating a still-beating cobra heart.’
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.
My Yelp ReviewsGreg Takayama © 2004 - 2012
