Food Journal

Today's post is all about food.

Katie's birthday was last Tuesday and, besides me making her breakfast and then going to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, we went out to dinner to eat sushi. This is one type of food we don't have a lot of experience with. The restaurant we went to was called Tomoe. It got a rating of 27 out of 30 on food in the Zagat survey (this little book is an absolute must-have for any New Yorker). Just for comparison, the highest rated restaurants get a 28. The survey also said to be prepared to stand in line for a while.

Well, it was as if they knew Katie was coming because we waltzed right in and got a seat in the small space. We had miso soup, seaweed salad (6 different kinds of seaweed!), pan-fried noodles with veggies, and a sampler platter of sushi and sashimi. Both sushi and sashimi are raw fish, but the sushi comes with rice wrapped in seaweed (as opposed to sashimi which is just the raw fish). Among other things, there were pieces of red snapper, yellowtail and blue-fin tuna, salmon, shrimp, mackerel, octopus, squid, clam, roe, and spicy tuna rolls. You could tell the fish was super fresh because, though raw, it didn’t have a “fishy” smell; it was all very, very good. Then we had a bowl of red bean and green tea ice cream for dessert.

The next entry in this food journal is to describe a party we went to on Saturday night (which dribbled into Sunday early morning). My friend Ted, whom I have known since freshman year at college, is an interesting character who stumbled across a publication from a European art movement from the 1920s and 30s called the Futurists. They were all about the juxtaposition of disparate elements. This particular document was a cookbook: The Futurist Cookbook. Apparently, it not only had explanations of their artistic objectives, but recipes incorporating those objectives as well.

For example, at Ted’s party we sampled variously named dishes from the “Sunrise” (stacked beet slices, smoked salmon and orange slices), another named something like “Apparition of Liberty” (biscotti, date, gorgonzola cheese, salmon roe within a radicchio leaf), there were also foods whose artistic names I cannot recall that consisted of pineapple topped by tuna and macadamia nut; appetizer of fennel, cumquat and olive; bread topped by mustard, banana and sardine; and rice cooked in either beer or wine. To drink we had “Alcoholic Joust” which was red wine augmented by soda water, lemon-lime and bitters (kind of like a weird sangria) and served with Swiss cheese and chocolate on the side. Everything was surprisingly good, which made us eager to try the dessert: vanilla ice cream covered with one of the following: 1) cayenne pepper, 2) wasabi beans, 3) chopped green and orange bell peppers. The contrast of spice to sweetness was very striking and for me, the wasabi ice cream was absolutely delicious. There were also cayenne pepper soaked maraschino cherries.

A good time was had by all 20 or so people who crammed into Ted’s studio apartment, and Katie and I found ourselves at home around 2:30am. Yikes! We haven’t stayed out that late in some time. Now Katie is at school from 8-5 everyday (a subject on which she will probably write about here on the blog sometime next week) and I am doing some work for Mannes, playing some gigs, and trying to get some good work done on my dissertation.