I know it's been a while since the last post.
This Thursday, I'll be leaving for the Charleston Food and Wine Festival.
Four days of Southern Food, friends and fancy fancy food people galore.
You think South Beach Food and Wine is crazy?
Try a bowl of shrimp and grits....

One of my fancier friends...

Today I'd like to tell you about a fabulous new blog.
It belongs to Michael Laiskonis, the pastry chef at Le Bernardin.

Michael has been at Le B for about 4 years. Eric Ripert found him
in Michigan. Not France, not New York or some Thomas Keller vehicle.
Michigan.
What does this mean? It means he was doing pastry in Michigan
better than most people do here in Gotham. I hope that puts a fire
under your butt.

Anyway, other than having the pastry chef position of NYC pastry positions,
being winner of the James Beard Award last year and sharing with me a love for
Fugazi and the Jam, he is also an intellegent and generous writer. Recipes, techniques and great photos fill the blog. Organized and a bit obsessed, don't let
him intimidate you. Note the gummy bear listing in a photo of his journal.

www.michael-laiskonis.com

The Real Thing

It's been quite a while since I've posted. I've had rather ambitious
plans about a big "what I intend to eat in the New Year" type of post
reminiscent of most other bloggers but unlike most bloggers, I forgot
I had a restaurant to run and that tends to take up most of my time.

Still suprises me sometimes.

Fact is, there isn't anything I'm really dying to eat in the New Year.
Other than really good food. I love dining out and I love dining in. Just love
dining. Good food can be found anywhere. So I'll stand back from dropping names
and showing off.

What I will talk about now is how I recently was brought back to every reason
I became what I am today.
We spent Christmas this year at my Aunt Gladys' house. Back to the Bronx for perhaps the best lasagne ever.
Really. Ever. But I'm going to go to her house soon and cook with her and that
right there will be one hell of a post so I'll leave the lasagne tip until later.

I always say that my favorite sweets from childhood are Italian bakery cookies.
Reginas, taralle...and don't get me started on the rainbow cookies. Where did those come from anyway???
I started to think in recent years that I just lost my taste for them. Didn't quite do for me what they did when I was a kid. So I wrote them off with the other things that don't quite do it for me anymore.

Now I know why.
Aunt Gladys had cookies from the bakery we always went to when I was a kid.
And yes, they were to die for. Why anyone would make a biscotti of lesser quality is beyond me.
They were from Sal and Doms on Allerton Avenue. Sal and Doms has maintained the
same quality all these years. Veniero's and DiRoberti's pale in comparison.

I'm a little suprised with all the hoopla people make about Arthur Avenue and the
amazing Italian food of the Bronx, no one has written about Sal and Doms.
It is truly the best.

Sal and Dom's Bakery
1108 Allerton Avenue
Bronx, NY

Today I'm going to talk a little Italian food. Probably a little overdue in my case but really, it's
a much talked about cuisine and considering my background--both having to do with my career and
my gene pool---I've felt there are people who at the moment live for it a bit more than I do.

And then I changed my mind.

A friend of mine, Roberta Corradin, a food writer from Rome is in NYC for a while
and spending even a small amount of time with her opened the flood gates for all that I
know and love about Italian food.....and chocolate.
In some ways chocolate is very separate from food for me. I've been very fortunate to have
had a lot of experience with great Italian chocolate before most people knew anything other than
Perugina Baci.
(When I was a kid we would go down to Little Italy for Sanguinaccio---chocolate and blood pudding.
I loved it. That's a very different post but it gives you an idea that I'll take chocolate in any form.)

Roberta and I have been talking a lot of chocolate these days. Domori has always been my hands-down
favorite. I worked for them breifly a few years back when the company was very small and everything was really
made by the owner, Gianluca Franzoni. Illy Coffee bought it recently. Which makes me very happy for Gianluca
and hopefully happy for the rest of the world as well. Perhaps now more people can experience it.
She's helping me get my hands on some to do some great baking at Lassi.


In her visit to NYC, Roberta is writing a piece on great lunch spots. So cool. I love lunch.
I'm a little over dinner these days and lunch always fits the bill.
She is also helping a dear publisher friend get his new project out there. It's a English version
of a famous cookbook in Italy "Nonna Genia's Classic Langhe Cookbook".
Langhe is not a particularly well-know part of Italy for Americans, I know. Tuscany shines bright
in that case but with my new found skill of cutting and pasting, I give you a little bit of Langhe from
some website I found:



Tucked away in northwest Italy and bordered by the Alps and Liguria, Piedmont (literally "Foothill") does not feel quite as Italian as other regions, the neighboring countries of Switzerland and France having had a distinct influence on its people. It is, however, a highly alluring region and one of the most delightful to be discovered in Italy. Nestled in the heart of Piedmont, the hilly, mist-cloaked area known as the Langhe is a region within a region. Located among medieval castles which stand guard over vineyards on gently rolling hills, the Langhe is an area almost entirely devoted to the cultivation of wine grapes and hazelnuts.

Did you read that? Wine grapes and hazelnuts. And the wine they are best known for is Barolo. Langhe is your
new best friend. They also specialize in white truffles, great cheeses and wild mushrooms.

The cookbook is really great. I don't have a lot of patience for a lot of cookbooks....not to say that I don't own a ton
and enjoy reading them but this is a book that makes you want to cook. Only a few do that for me.
It's a modest book. If you want pretty pictures, this isn't your thing but the recipes are fabulous and easy to read.

Some favorites:
Fava Bean Soup
Gnocchi with Tomato Sauce

Some that wow:
Chickpea soup with Spareribs
Blood Lasagne
"Capricious" Frittata (with salami, left over vean and parm)
Woodcock with Polenta

Roberta is a woman on a mission. She is here to help her publisher friend so he can put his kids in
school next year. She's got the book selling in Kitchen Arts and Letter and Bonnie Slotnick.
And you can always contact me for a book....or five.

Good website for the new restaurateur

A small jewel for those of you in the first steps of starting
your own empire. You're going to need a lot of legal things
done and that's expensive.

Check out www.legalzoom.com

Get your LLC, SCorp, trademarks, contracts and if
you see the whole restaurant thing being the end of you,
a will.

The fees are low and you are assigned a real lawyer.
I trademarked the name "Lassi" and was assigned a great
lawyer that worked for the government trademark office.
She taught me a lot and helped me get over many hurdles.

The monetary difference between a lawyer and LegalZoom?
$5000.00

Don't ever say I never gave you anything.

antique store, Callicoon, Sullivan County, NY

Nothing to do with food but I wish I had written it myself.

North Branch with New Eyes

Last weekend found me with the ability to do something
I rarely get to do, get the hell out of Dodge and breath
some mountain air.
My grandparents bought some land and a small, small, small
house in North Branch, NY in the Catskill Mountains sometime
in the early 50's. The coming years brought the addition of a couple
of bedrooms and, to my mother's delight, an indoor bathroom and the
destruction of the out house.
To say that the place was in the middle of nowhere would
be an understatement.
My cousins and I grew up going up there for weekends
with my grandparents when they were there on their vacations
and truly, there really wasn't anything to do.
I think TV came sometime in the 70's and cable in the 80's but
only in the way of Canadian sitcoms that weren't even picked up
by their own.
We saw the addition of a porch and then later the enclosing of the porch.
The wood paneling and carpeting remained and a short time after
we lost my grandfather, my father took it upon him to make
what was on overgrown acre of land into a beautiful landscaped
country home.
Yes, it was beautiful. IS beautiful.
We all loved the weekends up there but never much left the property
once we got there. My grandparents rarely did so why would we?

Fast forward to present. I took the weekend to get away with my good
friend Heather. Another restaurant person in need of a little mountain
air and some girltime.
We left the property. We met lots of people. It was crazy.
I suppose I should'nt have been suprised once my hairdresser had bought a house
in the area and there was a local gay pride parade but old impressions die hard.

This brings me to the Old North Branch Inn.

Last year the abandoned Old North Branch Inn was bought by Victoria
Lesser, a designer based in Key West who had bought a country house in nearby
Callicoon Center. The Inn seemed like a great project. Now she owns it and
lives there.

It still had an original bowling alley and a bar from the 1939 world's fair.

We met Victoria while grabbing a coffee and a piece of amazing apple pie
at Baxter's, the coffee bar she opened in the lobby. Only local bakers are
featured.


We took a tour of the rooms and decided that she had us at the bathrooms.
The place is respectful of where it is with just enought comforts (small flatscreen TVs, heat and enormous showers) to not feel like
you rented out someone's barn for the weekend. A night at the Inn: $120 or $140.
Fabulous.
A wine license is on the way. Cheese, wine and bowling nights are soon to follow.

We met a couple from the city now living in North Branch, Steve and Kimberly and their four-month-old Owen. Steve and Kimberly have started a record label which
means, unbeknownst to them, they'll be seeing me again in the near future.

Now other than pushing my new friend Victoria's inn, why are we here?
Food, of course.
Victoria came into the city a few days later and had lunch at Lassi.
I just loved that. I would do it but I would visit a toll booth if I knew someone.
She said she'd like to have guest chef dinners. I said I could get a ton of very
fabulous chefs who would love to do such a thing.
Well, I'll be the first.
Not a lot of Indian food up there in Sullivan County.
I have every intention of getting some great dinners going up there.
Some of my favorite chefs have already signed on.

Looks like it's going to be quite a summer and we haven't even
sold the last Tandoori turkey yet.