The 2009 Vendy Awards, a huge street vendor cookoff-fundraiser, was held this past weekend. For the last two years I’ve been their web dude–designing and developing the site and then updating throughout the year. I’m wasn’t able to attend on account of a last minute trip to Puerto Rico, but the great folks over at Serious Eats did a wonderful job of documenting it.
If you’re ever in need of a jack-of-all-trades web consultant/designer/developer, drop me an email at gregtakayama@gmail.com.
Ran across this beaut today. You can “grill” a bratwust in real time by blowing on the phone mic to stoke the flames. I said to a friend, “Cool, you can try blowing on my sausage tomorrow at the movies.” Apparently that statement has more than one meaning than playing with the latest iPhone app whilst watching dumb local bail bond ads before District 9.
I just cooked a bratwurst. I’m hungry and the app is great. This is a way better gimmick than the zippos lighter.
The meat is from Bell, a German meat company, and the app by Rod Kommunikation. It’s free in the app store (iTunes link).
via swissmiss.
Raging sausage of hell.
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.
I flew home this past Saturday morning to make it to a potluck at my 104 year old great uncle’s senior citizen’s home. On his wall is a letter signed by George W. Bush wishing him a happy 102nd birthday.
On Sunday, I made an 18lb turkey and a pumpkin pie from a recent Cook’s Illustrated recipe.
I’m flying down to San Diego tomorrow for Thanksgiving, part 2.5.
Here’s a little snap shot from seat 17A of Jamaica Bay on Saturday morning, taken with the new (replacement) point and shoot.
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.’
Every Saturday morning, I wander over to the Union Square Green Market with an empty reusable (gstar) bag and a bit of curiosity. I try to buy at least one item I’ve never cooked or purchased before. This past Saturday’s new items: leeks, winter squash and decorative squash (the knurly ones). I made a great potato leek soup from Alice Water’s recent book and put the squash in a place where they’d make people think “yep, it’s fall.”
Other purchases: honeycrisp apples (my current fave), arugula, cornbread and Vermont maple syrup (for impending pumpkin pancakes).
Twitter Says My Yelp ReviewsGreg Takayama © 2004 - 2010
