Summer pulls everyone this way and that. I myself have two more out of town trips planned, all the while balancing a schedule of classes to teach, demonstrations, and my 3 jobs.

At Veil, we are running on a skeleton crew with our sous chef working “off site” on a yacht for two weeks, and our owner/executive chef at home these past weeks with Jack, the newest member to his family. Tonight our chef de cuisine is also off site.

This leaves no one above me in the pecking order, thus I am in charge. I have had a management title for some time now, “pastry chef”, but never has there been anyone but myself in my department. Save the rare intern under my wing, like the outstanding Jasmine, I am really only in charge of myself.

Sure, I holler at the boys when I find things out of place, and offer guidance when applicable. But it’s been since the day I left Lampreia that I have managed the kitchen.

My reign begins tonight, and runs through the two brunch services this weekend. With all the authority of a substitute teacher, I am using it to do just one thing, run a brunch special.

I tested this dish a while ago, and it’s absolutely delicious. It needed but one thing, strawberries to be in season. This dish could have made it to the dessert menu, but here in the States, where we like to start our day off sweet, it is perfect for a summer brunch.

The dish is composed of warmed disks of cream of wheat, little patties that behave much like polenta. Once warmed, they are served with a mound of fresh strawberries, strawberry sauce, and a billowy cloud of malted whipped cream.

When testing recipes, the plates are left for the staff to taste, who usually pick at it, and leave some politely for those busy with other things. When we put this dish up, I made it 3 times, watching the staff devour it each time. This was fine with me, I improved the pick up and plating each time, and took the compliment.

(The “Pick up” is the steps a cook takes to prepare the food for your dish, from the moment the order is called to them to the time the food is completely plated. This covers everything from how you store the prepared components, to the manner in which you cook and hold them, and the process of putting the food on the plate. A good line cook will constantly watch their pick-up techniques looking for ways to streamline the process and improve quality.)

If you cant make it into Veil this weekend for the first of the season strawberries, and one of our stellar bloody mary’s or my preference the dirty caesar, then try making it at home.

Cream of wheat

3 cups milk

3/4 cups cream of wheat

1/2 cup brown sugar

2 tbsp butter

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt

1. Bring the milk and brown sugar to a simmer and whisk in cream of wheat. Whisk constantly to avoid lumps, and cook over low heat.

2. Stirring constantly, cook until the cream of wheat is thickened, about 5 to 8 minutes. When the mixture has thickened, stir in the butter, cinnamon, and salt. Pour this into a greased or plastic lined pan, roughly 9 by 9 inches. You can use any pan you have around, it will effect only the thickness of the patties.

3. Allow the cream of wheat to cool and set, and cut it into your desired shape. At Veil we will cut disks, which produces a little waste. To avoid this you can cut squares or triangles that utilize every bit of your cream of wheat.

Malted Whipped cream

2 cups cream

1/2 cup malted milk powder

1/4 cup sugar

1/2 tsp vanilla

1. Whisk the malted milk and sugar together, until even. Add the cream and vanilla and whip to medium peaks

Strawberries….

4 pints of berries, or what the heck, get the half flat!

Separate the best of the strawberries, reserving them for slicing. If you are short on time, take the B-list berries and immediately puree them with a little sugar in the blender, using as much or as little sweetener as you like. Strain the puree of seeds and serve in a pitcher or bowl with ladle. Slice the remaining berries and toss them with just enough sugar to gloss them.

If you have a little more time on your hands, follow the following process for making strawberry puree.  It is worth every extra step you take, and makes for a remarkable puree.

Strawberry puree

To Serve

Reheat the cream of wheat by frying them in a thin layer of butter, or alternately warm them on a greased cookie sheet in the oven. You can serve this family style, but the patties are delicate, and do better the less they move, so you might want to take them directly from reheating to the individuals plates.

Serve the berries and whipped cream family style, so each person can take as much or as little as they like

I withstood the rain today, meandering through the University farmers market in desparate hopes of a sign of a coming summer, and found it in two baskets of strawberries and a pound of cherries. The first of the year!

The cherries aren’t great, and let me tell you they certainly weren’t cheap! And I’ll bet if I counted, each strawberry ran me upwards of a quarter a piece. It wasn’t only my desperation for anything besides rhubarb that led me to these purchases.

Tomorrow, at noon, I will be the chef demonstrator at the farmers market on the street outside the pike place market. I have been a little nervous, you see. It’s really hard to demonstrate a dessert with out fruit! Last resort, I could have shown off my favorite rhubarb compote. But really, it’s June already, and rhubarb is like, so last season.

Thankfully I spied a table with my strawberries, which disappeared in a matter of minutes, myself taking two of the last four pints. The crates of cherries were going just as fast, but with a truck load carried over from Chellan I wasn’t at risk of missing out. They aren’t yet as sweet as I know they can be, bursting with the intense sunshine they absorb, so they will be treated to a pickle with balsamic and sugar , or a stewing of sorts with their pits.

Ironically, after all this hullabaloo over some fruit, that isn’t the focus of my demonstration tomorrow.

I will be demonstrating a technique for queso fresco. Nothing fancy, but this humble cheese is something I find incredibly impressive each time I do it. This cheese I have seen under many an alias. At Veil we call it Fromage Blanc on our menu, I have often seen it as Farmers Cheese, and the New York Times even featured a similar recipe under the name Ricotta. Press this cheese for a couple of hours, and you have Paneer.

This easy and quick cheese is a product of curdling milk at 170 degrees with an acid and straining the curds from the whey. This preparation varies from most other cheeses by using an acid rather than rennet to cut the casein’s, and break the curds from the whey, but that is a different post, waiting for myself to become better informed. Because an acid is so readily available, and this cheese is meant to be eaten as quickly as you can, it is the most accessible, and therefor humble of cheeses.

My introduction to this process was last summer at Veil, where we traded the milk for half and half laced with tarragon, rosemary, and thyme. This sat between a mascarpone enriched risotto and a veil of shaved parmesan surrounded by a thin drizzle of truffle oil. I have seen it stuffed into all manner of pastas, layered in lasagna’s, used in spreads, and of course in desserts like cheese cakes.

To apply this method to dessert, we will steep the milk with lemon balm before we break it, and serve it sweetened with a drizzle of honey, a scattering of toasted nuts. I chose this recipe because it is the perfect foil for summer fruit. While the New York Times called it bland in a good way, I prefer to think of it as subtle. Either way, it is definately a blank canvas, and can be dressed up or down, being paired with something simple like sliced strawberries tossed with a bit of sugar and black pepper, or something a bit more involved like peaches roasted with honey and chamomile. It could be scattered with fresh raspberries still warm from the sun they collected on the vines in your back yard minutes before, or pickled sour cherries. Sliced nectarines dusted with turbinado and burnt with a torch wouldn’t mind sharing the plate with this cheese, and a sautee of plums and cherry tomatoes a la Claudia Fleming would find a spot next to this cheese just as comfortable.

I am still formulating a dish to feature queso fresco at Veil, although I am sure we will call it Fromage Blanc as we always do. To take this simple summer dessert from the back yard to the white table cloth, I’ll add textural components, fruit components, force the cheese into an obedient shape with two spoons, and then design a beautiful plate to make this as much a feast for the eyes as the palate. Already I see a honey sauce stenciled on the plate, a proud white quenelle of queso fresco broken from sea breeze fresh raw milk, raspberries, crystallized ginger, shards of a cookie of some sort, and petite green leaves of lemon balm scattered.

But who knows where this dish will be by the time the rest of the fruit arrives. I do know that this delicious and amazing fresh cheese will help me and my menu welcome summer and her fruits into Veil.

Queso Fresco

Queso Fresco, or farmers cheese

½ gallon whole milk

2 to 4 oz lemon juice

1 tsp sea salt or kosher salt, or ½ tsp table salt

A handful of lemon balm or lemon verbena, or other fresh herbs

Equipment:

A fine mesh strainer

Cheese cloth

A large bowl

A large slotted spoon or slotted utensil

A thermometer that reads up to 180 degrees Fahrenheit

A large pot

A whisk

1. Prepare the mesh strainer by lining it with 3 layers of cheese cloth large enough to drape over the sides, and set it over the bowl.

2. Place the milk and salt in the large pot with the herbs, and scald. Remove from heat and allow to steep for 10 minutes. Insert the thermometer. Bring the milk back to 170 degrees, and begin whisking in the lemon juice, starting with 2 oz and adding more if needed. Whisk until the milk curdles, let it sit undisturbed for a few minutes.

3. Carefully transfer the solid curds to the cheese cloth lined strainer, removing the herbs, and allow to drain for 10 minutes. Alternately, you can carefully pour the contents of the pot into the strainer, slowly and with much caution.

4. When the whey has drained from the curds, remove them from the cheese cloth and transfer to a storage container. Chill for an hour or two before serving.

Sometimes I forget myself. I forget that I am good at what I do, do it every day, and have a solid lump of experience under my belt.

Hmmm…. that’s not quite right.

Sometimes I forget you. I forget that you aren’t me and don’t have the experience and daily handling that I do.

I am reminded of this occasionally when I am teaching a class and say things like, “it should be the texture of pastry cream.” You blankly stare at me, and I remember that you came to a beginners baking class today and may not have even heard of pastry cream, let alone know what it’s texture is like.

Molly Moon laughed at me a couple of days ago, saying, “Dana, I just love that you talk to me like I know what the heck you are talking about.” I thought we were discussing the hydration properties of the pectin in her stabilizer, but she just asked if I had put it in yet.

But often, my forgetfulness shows most when I make the statement, “oh this recipe is really easy.”

Then proceed to rattle off a dish that is easy to me in the professional kitchen I work in, or even in my home kitchen that I have outfitted with everything that makes my professional kitchen easy to work in, like giant super clingy cling film that sticks to everything, a box of full sheet sized parchment, a bakers bench with drawers full of every tool I could want, full of every pan I could need, bowls, sieves, and a stack of boxes filled with every pantry item I think to need.

My super easy strawberry buttermilk panna cotta is a breeze to me. But I have to admit, that the process might seem overwhelming to the novice. The cream is heated with sugar and lemon zest (everyone has a microplane, right?). The gelatin is soaked (everyone stockpiles sheet gelatin right?). Then the gelatin is melted into the hot cream and cooled slowly to body temperature (you have an hour to wait, right?). Meanwhile the strawberries, which have been frozen and thawed half way to damage the cell walls for better flavor, pigment, and pectin release, are pureed in a blender and sieved to remove the seeds and kept as cold as possible (you have a blender, sieve, and froze those berries in a single layer last night, right?)

Now, after all this, strain the cream into the strawberry buttermilk mixture, and pour into pretty little serving dishes (you have pretty serving dishes, and the refrigerator space to chill them, right?)

Well, I made a cake this weekend for a back yard barbecue that finally, finally, made me see what I was battling against when I tell people something is easy.

This cake is popular the country over with your church pot luck, back yard barbecue, and family gathering. While my family never made it, (we would have if my mom had the recipe), I have tasted this cake at friends gatherings. It’s nothing a “foodie” would claim to enjoy, although I bet many of them secretly do. During a plated dessert class we discussed nostalgic desserts and 3 of the students claimed this cake as their favorite nostalgic childhood dessert.

It’s called a poke cake, and it’s made by baking a white cake mix, and poking holes all over it, to which you pour jell-o across. The jell-o (I used orange) soaks in, and makes a moist, sweet, and yes, yummy dessert. Cover the whole thing with whipped cream, or better yet, a frosting recipe made by mixing a box of instant vanilla pudding with one cup of milk, and a tub of cool whip.

The result was actually fairly tasty. It’s not going on my menu, but I understand how it can be considered a favorite and brought to various events.

But after all was said and done, this cake was EASY. I had opened 4 containers, used only 3 ingredients that would be in everyones kitchen (eggs, oil, milk), and spent a maximum of 15 minutes preparing it. I used only 4 dishes, a measuring cup, a whisk, a spatula, and a bowl.

While I know this cake isn’t the crowining glory of american cuisine, it is the median. It is a cake that represents the word “easy” to many many home cooks. Compared to my experience in the kitchen this weekend, my easiest of recipes is a handful.

This cake helped put me in my place, and remind me that when I teach and discuss food with people not as entrenched in cuisine as I am, I need to remember where they are coming from. I need to remember you.

For further reading on my panna cotta process link here

For further reading on my puree process read here

“Easy” Strawberry Buttermilk Panna Cotta

250 g. heavy cream

200 g. sugar

Zest of 1 lemon

5 sheets gelatin

250 g. buttermilk

250 g. strawberry puree

1. Soak the gelatin leaves in ice water until soft and hydrated.

2. Mix the cream, sugar, and lemon zest in a small pot, and bring to a boil, whisking until the sugar is disolved. REmove from heat.

3. Remove the gelatin from the ice water, squeeze the excess water from it, and add it to the hot cream, stirring until disolved and evenly distributed.

4. Let this sit on the counter away from heat and come down in temperature slowly, until it is just below body temperature.

5. Meanwhile, mix the buttermilk and strawberry puree well and keep cold.

6. When the cream has come down in temperature, strain it into the cold strawberry buttermilk, and whisk to combine.

7. Pour this into pretty serving dishes, and chill overnight, or at least 8 hours.

I know I haven’t had a terrible amount to say lately, save a little on one of the easiest Rhubarb preparations I know, and a blurb about cherries I worked with last year.  I’ve been BUSY!

I have multiple jobs you know.

Veil, I spend 20 hours a week split between two days preparing the desserts.  Then there is Molly Moons, you could have guessed that I could never just make toppings for that lovely girl, and I’d end up churning ice cream a couple days a week.  I just love it there.  It has the feel of hanging out with a friend, mixed with the ease of a high school summer job, and the exciting challenge of working with something completely new.  Ice cream certainly isn’t new to me.  But producing ice cream in large batches is a very different animal, and I am loving it.

So despite my best attempts at writing interesting things for you, I continue to come up empty.  This post is no different, I am instead pointing you to the blog I have been pouring over these past few weeks.

L20 is a blog following the opening of Laurent Gras new restaurant in Chicago.  It’s interesting to me because the chatter amongst chefs I know is that fine dining is dying, particularly in Seattle where the hottest new restaurants aren’t temples to cuisine, rather late night pasta joints, fried fish served under a club, small plates of every kind.  Even in New York, Stupak went on record about his future plans to open a cheap casual Mexican restaurant, and David Chang, it seems, is taking over the world.   But here is a restaurant resurrecting the guiredon, a cart used to heighten the tableside experience.  Where as other chefs are stripping the experience they offer, Laurent Gras is doing everything to add to his, like installing deck ovens to bake bread in house, and hiring a brigade of 25 cooks!

I am not saying there is a better or worse.  I myself spend far more time in casual restaurants, and abhor a mediocre fine dining experience.  It’s just nice to see someone creating what appears to be the real deal, fine dining with every detail thought out and pushed to excellence.

In other parts of the world, fruit is in season. In places other than Seattle, pastry chefs are working with more than Rhubarb.

But no matter how many sunny Seattle weekends drive a burning desire to work with fruit, nothing but Rhubarb, which technically isn’t even a fruit, is available to me.

I know, I know. Soon I will be whining that there is so much fruit and so little time. You see, here in this great green city, our fruit seasons are compacted onto each other for 3 quick and furious months.

In two weeks strawberries will come, followed quickly by raspberries. Plums will begin the stone fruit season, and by the time I have a dish worked out for them, cherries will be piling up and the first of the peaches and nectarines will be coming in.

But until then it’s all rhubarb, all the time.

This year, I have been making a lot of my favorite rhubarb recipe, orange rhubarb compote. Aside from being a fixture in my refrigerator and being gifted to friends, this working girl of a compote has a healthy professional career. She wakes up early dressed in soft hues of pink, to work at Veil’s brunch, served with toasted Columbia City breads in the morning. Moving into evening, she slips into something sexy, and nests a quenelle of buttermilk sorbet. Across town, this lady changes into her jeans and t-shirt and spends each day covering scoops of Molly Moon’s fantastic ice cream and is featured in a sundae with lemon ice cream, Chukar cherries, and vanilla whipped cream.

In a near brush with fame, this compote was to be featured in a local magazine. However, it hit the cutting room floor, making it necessary to share the recipe here with you. Soft, luxurious, and intensely deep in flavor, this compote’s real attraction is the simplicity in which it is prepared.  I think you too will find yourself coming back to this recipe again and again, maybe even well into the onslaught of seasonal fruit.

Orange Rhubarb Compote

2 tbsp butter

1 lb rhubarb

3/4 cup sugar

2 tbsp orange liquor

zest of one orange

1. Trim the Rhubarb of the ends, and split it lengthwise down the center. Cut across in 1 cm. intervals, leaving you with rough cubes of rhubarb.

2. In a large bowl, toss the rhubarb with the sugar and orange liquor, and orange zest, and set aside.

3. Melt the butter in a medium heavy bottomed saucepan over medium heat. When the butter has melted add the sugar coated rhubarb. Let this cook over a medium heat, undisturbed, for about 2 minutes. When the rhubarb has started to release juices, gently stir.

3. Continue cooking the compote over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the juices are all released, then begin to thicken. Cooking time is about 10 to 15 minutes total, until the compote looks thick and the rhubarb is tender.

Notes:

* I set a timer last time I made it, just for you, and it took 13 minutes and 17 seconds until the desired texture and thickness was reached. This time will depend on the size of your rhubarb pieces, the particular heat of “medium” on your stove, etc, etc, etc. So use your intuition.

* Many of the cubes will break down from cooking, but some of the larger ones will remain as little tender lumps, offering bursts of tart rhubarb flavor in the mouth, and a pleasant texture on the tongue. If you like, you can break all the rhubarb apart with aggressive stirring, using the spoon to break the rhubarb up. You might even puree it and pass it through a sieve if you are looking for a smooth compote. But the less you stir, the more chunks you will leave intact.

You may remember last summer, when I staged at WD-50.  What I didn’t tell you was that I rushed home for cherries.  Not just any cherries, Montmorency sour cherries, picked fresh from a tree in my neighborhood, by one of my favorite people on the planet, Iris.

Iris came over with the cherries, and her parents, she’s only 4 after all.  And her dad brought with him two more friends, Lara, and Neil.

We spent the afternoon making treats with the cherries, a goat cheese panna cotta with sweet pickled cherries, zeppolle with a sour cherry sauce for dipping, and a clafouti with an attempt at cherry pit ice cream.

The attempt failed when I took my chilled base out to churn, and looked in my freezer for the bowl to my counter top ice cream maker.  It was not frozen, and my base was not to be ice cream that day.  But all was not lost, we dipped zeppolle in the cherry pit infused custard as well.

I must argue for this clafouti batter.  This was the batter I learned clafouti with, blind to the fact that it is a bit nontraditional.  Where as most batters are just that, batters that sink a bit below the fruit, and bake into a custardy pancake, this batter contains whipped egg whites and cream, and soufflees above the fruit a bit, light and creamy, and unforgettable.   We kept it on the menu at Lampreia for as long as there was fresh fruit to sit below, which in Seattle means about 6 months out of the year.

The cherry pits ice cream, I must argue as well.  With trace amounts of cyanide, eating a handful of cherry pits is not something I would advise.  However, cracking them and infusing them into cream releases an amazing potent flavor, reliant on the flavor molecule benzaldahyde which is found in bitter almonds, apricot pits, peach pits, and regular cherry pits, and is responsible for what we consider, “fake” almond flavoring.  If you have ever wondered why an almond in no way tastes like almond flavor, it’s due to the fact that almond flavor is extracted from bitter almonds, not the kind we eat out of hand.

I didn’t write about it because Matthew, Iris’s dad did.  He wrote, Lara photographed, and finally Gourmet published it online!  So take a quick trip over to Gourmet.com, and read about our day in detail.  The clafouti recipe is published, along with the pickled sour cherries.  Following is the goat cheese panna cotta recipe, which is pictured covered with pickled sour cherries, and the cherry pit ice cream, which was replaced with vanilla for the day, delicious no doubt, but not quite the same.

Goat Cheese Panna Cotta

3 cups cream

8 oz goat cheese, at room temp

1 cup milk

½ cup sugar

Salt to taste

1 envelope powdered gelatin, bloomed in 3 tbsp water

1. Bring the milk and sugar to a simmer and add the bloomed gelatin. Remove from heat and stir until the gelatin is completely dissolved.
2. Warm the goat cheese slightly to soften, and mix the cream and goat cheese in a blender until the mixture is smooth and even. Taste the mixture and add salt to your liking. Strain in the warm milk/gelatin, and spin until the mixture is even.
3. Pour the panna cotta mixture into molds, ramekins, pyrex custard cups, or pretty little teacups you may also collect from rummage sales.
4. Chill these for 6 hours.

Cherry Pit Ice Cream

3 cups cream

1 cup milk

1 cup sugar

6 egg yolks

The pits 50 to 70 cherries

1. Crack the pits open and extract the kernel inside, discarding the hard shell. I do this by folding them inside a dishtowel and hitting them with a hammer, or the back of a small heavy pot.
2. In a food processor, pulse the sugar with the kernels until the kernels are fine. Alternately, chop them with a knife, then mix with the sugar.
3. In a medium saucepan with a heavy bottom, bring the cream and milk to a boil and stir in the cherry pit sugar. Remove the cream from the heat and allow to steep for an hour, longer if you want a more intense flavor, and bring it back up to temperature before adding to the eggs. Strain this mixture through a fine mesh strainer before adding to the eggs.
4. Whisk one third of the hot cherry pit cream into the eggs, and return this mixture to the pot of cream, stirring with a heatproof rubber spatula.
5. Cook this over a medium heat stirring constantly until the mixture thickens and reaches 170 degrees and thickens.
6. Immediately chill this over an ice bath. When the ice cream base is cooled, transfer to a storage container and refrigerate over night, allowing the flavors to marry.
7. Churn in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturers directions.

Click photo to see entire album.

My love for Balthazar is not a secret. I always question how much of my enjoyment of their food is connected to their warm, well worn, perfect environment. I try so hard to not let things like decor affect my enjoyment of the food, but I admit with Balthazar it’s a difficult web to untangle. So, with my admittedly possibly biased viewpoint, onto breakfast.

It was a quick meal. Perfectly cooked bacon, scrambled eggs and asparagus in pastry dough, and buckwheat crepes with ham and gruyere. As usual the food matches the decor. It’s very well executed and completely coherent with the French bistro identity. The ham and gruyere were a lovely combination, salt, smoke, tangy cheese, against the slightly rustic crepe texture. The scrambled eggs were seasoned a little unevenly, but in the spots where they were right, they were quite yummy.

And as nice as the atmosphere is at Balthazar, I am still convinced that if you fed me their food in my garage, I’d enjoy it just as much.

For everyone in the Seattle area, Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream shop is opening today.

I am making the toppings for sundaes and splits, including hot fudge, butterscotch, vanilla bean caramel, and a rotating seasonal fruit compote, currently a luscious orange rhubarb.

Molly has sourced everything as locally as possible, with the cream itself coming from Snoqualmie Gourmet in Maltby, berries from Carnation, Hazelnuts from Holmquist, everything being organic.  IF you decide against a cone, no worries, cups and spoons are completely compostable.

As far as toppings are concerned, I recommend the orange rhubarb on a scoop of strawberry, made with Remlinger farms strawberries.  Although the strawberry with a balsamic ribbon is hard to argue away, especially if you ask for an extra drizzle of the balsamic reduction over the top.

I wouldn’t turn down a scoop of scout mint, mint ice cream with crushed thin mint cookies, doused in hot fudge either.

The vanilla bean caramel would do nicely with the vivace coffee, or over a plain jane scoop of chocolate.  And would it be gilding the lilly to ask for caramel sauce over the tres chic salted caramel ice cream?

But where to put the butterscotch?

Certainly not on the honey lavender, my absolute favorite of molly’s flavors.

Definitely not on the bubble gum ice cream, studded with confetti bits of gum, the most popular with the little ones.

Not on the creamy lemon ice cream, or the local raspberry sorbet.

No way on the creamy thai iced tea ice cream, or the cardamom.

Maybe over the maple walnut, an old fashioned flavor that tempts the old woman that lives inside me.

I’ve got it!  Nothing could be a better foil for my bu-bu-buttery butterscotch than the queen of all flavors, vanilla.

Come down today for the party, free scoops from 3 to 5 for the kids, and a little treat for us older kids,  a series of DJ’s, friends of Molly’s from her former career in the music biz, including a member of the Shins!

If you can’t make it today, no worries, the shop is open from noon until 11 from now on.

I am a big big believer in focus leading to quality. (Note: not just a big believer. That’s TWO bigs!) I enjoy all sorts of restaurants that focus on one item — chocolate, hot dogs, bagels, etc. But one of my favorite foods is macaroni and cheese. It’s a perfect food item in my opinion. And honestly, I grew up eating a lot of orange powder on my elbows. It didn’t ruin me though. Over the years I have experimented often with finding just the right combination of the right shape of not-overcooked pasta, non-rubbery cheese, just the right amount of crunchy topping, and flavor with a capital F. In my kitchen I am still an infinite distance from my goal.

(I will claim a small victory here in that my children have been trained carefully to categorically reject the orange stuff and prefer freshly grated high quality cheese and butter on their pasta. Anyone with small kids knows that this is just a baby step, but an important one nonetheless.)

Wandering by Supermac in Manhattan today I wondered if there was a break in the clouds. True, it’s not something that I was able to make myself, but I’m a big believer in relying on professionals to do their jobs — especially when it comes to food. I’m also a big fan of single purpose restaurants. I don’t want to eat somewhere that makes sushi, steak, pasta, and “gourmet” ice cream. I’d rather stop at a variety of small establishments each doing their best at one thing. My perfect world is a bunch of stalls - think of them as slightly bigger than street food carts.

Supermac has some variety on the menu but it’s all fundamentally macaroni and cheese. I got a small serving of the basic. And honestly, I loved it. The topping was the special house blend of toasted and seasoned breadcrumbs. They had a nice uneven texture to them almost like the fancy sea salt flakes you buy. The seasoning was nice, and they weren’t too baked in to the top. They weren’t quite resting on top either. They were somewhere in between. Most importantly there was just the right amount. You don’t want to run out of crunchy stuff while you still have a bunch of noodles and cheese to eat. Should part of your experience be crunchless? I say no!

The noodles were cooked nicely. And the cheese? I got the four cheese mix. Getting the cheese right is very difficult. Not only does it need to be cream and flavorful, but it has to mix completely with the noodles. And it also needs to stay pretty liquidy. I’m not a fan of gelatinous cheese. I spied the Supermac folks using a saute pan to prepare my noodle cheese mixture. Excellent work. No pre-done stuff for them. Everything was to order.

All in all, I can’t wait for Supermac to open up a branch in Seattle. Next time, I’ll have to try some of the variations they serve.

Living in Seattle my choice for fried chicken is a place called Ezell’s. Honestly, it’s not as good as everyone claims. The texture of the coating is nice and crunchy, but the non-spicy chicken I had there was essentially flavorless. The spicy was, well, spicy, but not much else.

But this week, I’m in Manhattan. My friend has been bugging me to try his favorite fried chicken place, but we haven’t stopped there yet. Instead, today we found ourselves outside Piece of Chicken in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. Tucked down a sidestreet (W 45th between 8th and 9th). To her credit, Jenny spotted it out of the corner of her eye and said “let’s go”.

A large kitchen sits behind a rectangle cut into the wall. That’s where you order, that’s where you pay, that’s where you get your food. Where you eat is your problem. We chose to eat a few feet away on a stoop, ignoring the sign that disallowed us from sitting there. Luckily we didn’t get caught.

The menu is not small, but the star is of course the chicken. You can get a piece of fried chicken for a dollar. Yep. A dollar. Jenny being from the south ordered Chicken and Waffles for us. Despite how many places I’ve eaten I’m still really dumb about lots of culinary traditions. Southern food is no exception. I don’t know what I thought chicken and waffles would be. Maybe a drumstick wrapped in a waffle? (McDonalds I expect royalties if you follow through on that.) Nope. It’s exactly what it says, three pieces of golden fried chicken and four waffles (and two tubs of syrup).

Like many non-obvious food combinations, to me chicken and waffles is evidence of evolution at work. When you have diversity (lots of different food combinations), reproduction (lots of different restaurants making dishes over and over), and selection (customers going to restaurants they like) you get evolution. And I’m sure there were countless combinations tried, but chicken and waffles stuck. And it works.

The waffles had corn meal in them. They had sort of a rustic quality about them. And the fake maple syrup (a guilty pleasure of mine) was perfect on top. The chicken was super flavorful. We had white meat. To me, white meat is the true test of fried chicken. It’s not hard to make dark meat juicy. Unfortunately, here Piece of Chicken was a little more mixed. Of our three pieces, one was dry, one was juicy, and one was in the middle. In some cases the juicy factor was different in different bites of the same piece. I will say though that the savory flavorfulness of the crispy skin did a lot to compensate.

Juiciness inconsistency aside, we quite enjoyed Piece of Chicken. Maybe we’ll get to compare it to the Korean fried chicken place my friend raves about before the week is up.