We here at t:e headquarters are very thankful for everything at Chengdu 23. Even the dopey flowers.
2011 wasn't a terribly active year in t:e posts, but make no mistake, food was eaten, spirits were stirred, and finds were found.
Looking back at the past year, here are some things that the t:e army of editors is very thankful for...
Have you had enough of New Jersey? Here at the t:e organization, we get that way, generally several times a year. But, this is a self-proclaimed "New Jersey-centric" blog, so the "editor" refrains, for the most part, from talking about food from other parts of the globe.
On the one hand, I think this focus makes tommy:eats a unique blog; after all, its purpose isn't to focus on the "editor-in-chief" and his personal exploits and various interests outside of food (you know little about me, and I prefer to keep it that way). But rather, its purpose is to focus on the good stuff in, and sometimes around, New Jersey. You come here, and you read about food. No bullshit, no filler.
But, alas, I, the "managing editor" of tommy:eats, do run out of New Jersey-centric topics on which to opine, as any reader no doubt realizes. This is largely due to the fact that I rarely post about a restaurant that I simply do not like...of which there are many, at which many of my dollars are spent. These are wasted meals, and wasted opportunities to share a good experience...not to mention wasted money.
So what's an "editor-at-large" supposed to do? Just ignore his fan base? Well, yes, usually. And you will be especially ignored if you think I fancy myself an "editor." Maybe change the rules a bit?
There is, I should note, a precedent for this rule tweaking. As you no doubt don't recall, I enjoyed the hell out of the navel-gazing Lollapalooza report from my first year with this blog. I wrestled with posting it, as it wasn't NJ-centric. But at the end of the day it made me very happy to share that experience with people. After all, it contained reports of hot dogs, steaks, burgers, pizza, and music. And if you don't enjoy at least one of those things, you're probably not reading this right now.
Something's got to give here at the t:e organization. To heck with it! We love NJ, but there's a lot more good stuff out there, just over the Jersey border somewhere, right? And some of you might even end up where that stuff is.
So who wants to hear about Texas BBQ? WOO-HOO! Let's do this thing.
Restaurant websites are pretty piss-poor around these parts in New Jersey. Trust me when I say that I don't even want to go down this road, because it this subject could end up dominating this blog, and giving me a full-time writing job that I'm not prepared to take on.
Unnecessary flash pages (which preclude the use of an iPhone and other mobile devices), ridiculous music, hard-to-find basic information (address, phone, and hours), typos, and just all-around amateurish design, are the norm, rather than the exception.
I guess you just have to give a restaurant credit for making just a wee bit of effort.
A couple of commenters on this BOM (blog o' mine) have been mentioning Spring Valley's Vietnam restaurant for some time now. It's been on my list, and we finally took the drive up to see what all the fuss was about. The fuss, it was merited.
A few of my first posts were on pizza, espousing the virtues of making it at home. That was, I can hardly imagine, 3 years ago. I still believe that you should be making pizza at home. However, in those 3 years, I've made probably 200 pizze, and my methodology has been tweaked and refined. It took that 3 years to get to the point where I thought I had something halfway meaningful to share, but I think I'm actually there. The biggest change: I now make the dough instead of buying it from a pizza shop.
Making dough gives me a sense of satisfication that I cannot fully put into words. The next step would be to make my own mozzerella, and I suspect this isn't far behind. But on to the dough...
In my attempts to make Neapolitan-style pizza, I tend to make a dough that's quite wet; dough with a "high hydration", as they say in the pizza-making world. This means a higher ratio of water to flour.
I use King Arthur bread flour. Let us not forget that we're making bread here.
Steak at Ristorante Tasso, Sorrento, Italy
One of the key elements of the classic American steakhouse is girth. We love big steaks, and steakhouses know how to cook 'em: charred on the outside, and medium rare inside. I'm certainly of the opinion that a steak needs a good "char" on the outside, which adds to the flavor and texture of the meat. A thick cut of meat and 1800 degree broilers help to make that char possible while still keeping the inside at a medium rare temp. That's the steakhouse approach, and one to which I fully subscribe.
A friend of mine from out west told me about a great pizza place in Santa Rosa, CA. "You have to go to this place for pizza when you come out here. It's called Rosso." A very smart man, even though he also said they put corn meal on the bottom of the crust, which is simply not the case. But that's a subject for another argument.
Continue reading "Rosso: pizzeria + wine bar: Santa Rosa, CA" »
This week I've been thoroughly (and I mean, thoroughly), enjoying a cocktail out of the Food & Wine Cocktails 2008 book called "Revival". This cocktail, per the book, is from the bar manager from Monarch, in St. Louis. I think I want to go to St. Louis
Once again I found myself emailing iamnotachef about food instead of posting on this blog about food. Don't get me wrong, I'm not under the impression that there's a collective minion out there who are hanging on my every word, but every now and again I feel the tinge of responsibility to actually keep this blog going, rather than just shutting it down completely or let it sit out there dormant. For today, my choice is to keep it going with another post.
I emailed iamnotachef a few mornings back telling him that I've been really into making green chile stuffs, which are way better than ketchup. About 10 minutes later, he's got this post about how mustard is the "new ketchup". OK, well, first off, he shamelessly stole my idea. Second, he's wrong: green chile stuff is the new ketchup.
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