Summer of Seafood

It’s been upwards of 90 degrees outside for the last few days (although a woman I work with insists that it’s “a thousand”) and at times I’ve thought that unless I plunge myself into the ocean immediately, I won’t be able to go on. There isn’t a very accessible ocean around here, but seafood is pretty easy to get to, so instead I’ve been plunging myself into that.

First, there was the Swedish Midsummer Festival. The lawns at Battery City Park filled with blond heads wreathed with flowers, sipping champagne and flowery Swedish spirits, dolloping pickled herring onto crackers, and enjoying the view of the water (though unfortunately it wasn’t the kind of water you can jump into). The food vendors had all sorts of specialties – meatballs, cured salmon, new potato salads – but the lines were unfathomably long, and our stomachs dictated that we choose the shortest one, which meant we were getting korv: hot dogs. The hot dogs were served plain or topped with skagen, a shrimp salad with mayonnaise and dill, and as a waited impatiently in line, I realized that I’d much rather have a skagen sandwich than a hot dog with skagen on top of it. I requested this, a little nervously, when I finally reached the front of the line, and they very obligingly made my special order. The cool, creamy salad was the perfect end to a sweltering day.

The next afternoon I headed out into the sun again, to check out something that had been on my to-do list for several months. The food vendors at the Red Hook ballfields have gotten a lot of press lately, and their set up has changed since the Health Department forced them to give up their tents and move into trucks. But the food and the atmosphere seem to have remained intact: the shady sidewalk on Bay Street feels like an escape from the rest of the city, and the cooks are still turning out authentic Latin American food, at a pace that suits them. The shrimp ceviche was perfectly sweet and tangy, with a nice heat from the green hot sauce that they add just before serving. I was also excited to try pupusas, a Salvadoran dish of fried maize flour cakes filled with cheese and vegetables or meat. The pupusas platter was an unbelievable deal: one pork pupusa, one cheese and loroco flower pupusa, a pile of chicharones (fried cubes of fatty pork), and a side of bright purple cabbage slaw, all for only seven dollars. The pupusas were the best part; the mild cheese and soft dough were a decadent combination.

Two servings of shrimp in less than 24 hours seemed like impressive seafood consumption, but I was about to get much, much closer to the fruits of the sea. When I arrived at Talei’s apartment that night, everything seemed fairly normal: spotless as usual, some friendly faces standing around, an open bottle of wine. Except that the sink was full of live crabs. They clawed vaguely at the sides of the sink and at each other, possibly trying to reach the ones neatly stacked on a platter to ask them why they were so…pink. Talei bravely took on the task of transferring the live ones to the pot, but after lifting one of them out of the sink to find that it was gripping the detached claw of a different crab, she declared that they “had personalities” and she didn’t want to kill any more herself. I volunteered to kill one crab, testing out how I felt about my recent decision not to become a vegetarian. In the end, most of the food preparation was done expertly by Paul, who had more seafood experience than the rest of us.

After an informative demonstration by Hien on How to Eat Blue Crab, the twelve of us started grabbing specimens from the two enormous heaps in the middle of the table and cracking into them ourselves. Crab juice, crab guts, and flecks of crab shell flew everywhere. It was hard to get at the meat, but what I did manage to pry out was delicious: subtly sweet and seasoned by the broth it was boiled in. The orange eggs were easier to find; they had the texture of hard-boiled egg yolk, but with a slightly bitter aftertaste. I don’t know how long we stood around the table, our hands dripping with clam juice, prying open crab after crab. We went through at least three large platters before getting tired of it. And then moved on to oysters.

This seafood-filled weekend was a reminder of the advantages of sticking to coasts, never straying too far from the ocean.

Lebanese Festival

When I showed up at Henry and Remsen for the Our Lady of Lebanon church festival, things were just starting up. While volunteers were still busy constructing tents and taping down tablecloths, the grills were already hot, the food tables laden, and the music blaring. These people know how to prioritize.

A long buffet offered all kinds of meat and vegetable options: lamb and chicken kebabs, kibbeh (ground meat and spices) pressed into a huge casserole, dolmas, flaky savory pies, grilled corn, and all the side salads you'd expect. We got a sampler platter with lamb, muhadarra, tabloule, green beans, and fatoush, then lined up for some sajj bread.

The sajj cooking stations were metal domes heated from inside by coals or some other kind of roaring fire, and standing next to them in 90-degree weather tested your true desire for some sajj. The volunteer cooks made it look irresistible, though, laying thin discs of dough onto the hot metal and slathering them with different appetizing fillings from meat sauce to cheese to zaatar paste. When the underside was crispy and slightly blackened, they’d fold them in half and serve them straight off the stove: a Middle Eastern quesadilla. A friend got one of the meat-filled versions, and I asked for a plain piece, just to try it out.

We sat down at one of the long tables and started in on our food, pausing only when some people had to stuff a tablecloth underneath it. Though the platter was more expensive and less generous than most of the Middle Eastern restaurants in the area, it did have a noticeable homemade quality that set it apart. The dressing on the fatoush salad had the buttery sweetness that emerges from the right proportions of lemon and olive oil, and the muhadarra, a mix of lentils, rice, and sautéed onions, was extremely flavorful, much better than many versions I’ve had at restaurants, which tend to be a bit dry. The saaj was different from baked pita, chewier and less bready (which is why the sajj at Fatoush made such good breakfast tacos).

I was too full to reap all the benefits of the dessert table, but I sampled a few bites of a Lebanese pudding flavored with almond and cinnamon and sprinkled with coconut flakes. I wish I could have tried the namoura (also called basbousa), a semolina cake soaked in sweet syrup that I discovered earlier this year at my birthday dinner at Waterfalls, but I might try to make it for an upcoming birthday to make up for this missed opportunity.

I passed by the festival later in the afternoon while doing errands, and it was still going strong. By then the bouncy houses were fully inflated and filled with children, and there was still plenty of food and drinks to occupy their parents for many more hours. I could sense a dance party coming on, since I’m sure everyone was drawn to the event, as I was, by the flyer’s promise of a “DJ ALL THREE DAYS.” I didn’t wait around to find out, but I think the block partied late into the evening.

Fifth Avenue Fair

By far, the best part of summer is being outside most of the time, and an important sub-part of that is eating and drinking outside. If, like many urban dwellers, you don’t have a backyard, it can be slightly more difficult to arrange these kinds of activities. Some countries make it easy, and the summer I spent in Paris was full of night-picnicking on the steps of Sacre Coeur or on the lawn of the Champ de Mars with a slab of Comté, a few baguettes, and several bottles of wine.

But this Puritan nation of ours is less accommodating (in more areas than this), and we have to be more surreptitious here. Except on those lovely days when the city fences off a length of an avenue for the most delightful of summer events: the street fair.

The 5^th Avenue Fair, which happened a few weekends ago, includes many of the less exciting aspects of those generic street fairs that pop up on blocks of the Village every weekend between May and October, but it goes far beyond Mozzarepas and fake silk scarves. All the local restaurants make an appearance, and there’s a lot of good food to choose from. We started out at the Bierkraft stand, which was selling gigantic pulled pork sandwiches and watermelon beer. The beer tasted like a yeasty Jolly Rancher, which was actually very refreshing in the heat.

I had considerable trouble deciding between the many Greek and South American food carts, but was very happy with the hummus wrap I settled on, a sun-dried tomato tortilla filled with hummus, kalamata olives, tomatoes, and feta. We then met up with a few more friends, who were coming from brunch and didn’t need more food, but had a different excellent idea: margaritas.

Naturally, I had already identified the cheapest margarita stand, so we all lined up there. As we each successively took a first sip from our to-go cup, the same reaction passed over each of our faces, an expression of the thought, “Oh, this is much stronger than I had expected.” We continued down 5^th Avenue, sipping our sour tequila, slowly fading into a sun-soaked daze. It was a beautiful day, and one of those prized opportunities to walk around in a slightly heightened state in a crowd of several thousand happy Brooklynites of all ages, shapes, and colors.

Stay tuned for more summer food festivals: The Lebanese, Greek, and Swedish Midsummer Festivals are all coming up.

Brooklyn Flea

The Williamsburg Savings Bank at One Hanson Place is a fixture of the landscape from any vantage point in downtown Brooklyn and the surrounding neighborhoods, including Boerum Hill, north Park Slope, Fort Greene, and Prospect Heights. Its skinny clock tower informs commuters getting off at the Atlantic Terminal just how long it took them to get over the bridge, and runners emerging from Prospect Park and shooting down Flatbush Avenue can check it to see exactly how long they have to get back home if they want to be on time for work. The building's stately architecture lent some class to the view from my fire escape on Pacific Street, counteracting the neon signs of Chuck E. Cheese and "HOME EATER PRO" (once "Home Theater Pro-Line," before light bulbs got too expensive to replace).

But the exterior, nice as it is, does not betray the impressiveness of the design inside the building, which is now open to visitors as the Sunday location of the Brooklyn Flea. Once inside, you find yourself surrounded by soft pink marble, vaulted ceilings with detailed midnight blue and gold designs, doors and corridors framed by wrought-iron gratings. All that and the signs pointing you to "Life Insurance" and "Bonds" are enough to make you think you've stepped into a different era, but the feeling is enhanced by the fact that it's a flea market, so, naturally, you're surrounded by a lot of old stuff. Vintage boots, antique posters, assorted taxidermy - all things I would contemplate saving up for if I weren't dreading the task of transporting all the belongings I already have across the country in a few months. But even if you're not in the market for any retro knickknacks, it's an entertaining environment to walk around in for an hour or so.

The food offerings at the Brooklyn Flea, meanwhile, are entirely representative of Brooklyn in the present moment. At the McClure's Pickles table I sampled some Bloody Mary mix made with their spicy garlic dill pickles and some tomato puree, which was delicious, but probably too salty to drink in large quantities. There was artisanal chocolate flecked with sea salt crystals, and home-brewing kits with everything you need to make one gallon of your own lavender-flavored beer. Then, more pickles to rival McClure's: Rick's Pick's table was covered with jars of pickled okra, asparagus, red peppers, and green beans. I also finally discovered that Kumquat Cupcakes, which I had seen advertised on a cafe chalkboard near my apartment, does not refer to any kind of citrusy confection, but rather to an entire bakery operation. And their signature cupcake is hardly fruity: a maple pecan cake topped with creamy frosting and a piece of bacon.

I worry that Brooklyn’s bounty of historic buildings, inventive baking, and obsessive pickling has spoiled me; but I suppose I have to enjoy it while I can, and I’m glad I happened to stumble upon the flea market at One Hanson this weekend.

Found: Affordable Bubble Tea in Sunset Park

Bubble tea goes by many names: tapioca tea, pearl milk tea, boba; it comes in even more flavors and varieties: hot or cold, liquid or blended slushie, infused with ginger, almond, taro, blended with fruit or mixed with red bean. It has been a personal quest of mine to test and compare variations of this Taiwanese invention wherever I find it, but unfortunately this is an expensive habit in this city. I was introduced to the drink at Quickeley on Bancroft in Berkeley, and every trip home includes almost daily visits to its new Durant location (where it has dropped the locally inspired spelling and become “Quickly”) for the 99-cent tea special, which, with tapioca pearls added, comes to the reasonable price of $1.19. The “bubble milk tea” flavor is a straightforward black tea, creamy and satisfyingly sweet. It’s either incredibly simple or incredibly strange that gelatinous spheres, milky tea and ice could combine to create such a refreshing treat.

But simple or strange, it is not to be had cheaply in Manhattan. The standard price I’ve found is $2.95, and that’s usually for the more basic flavors – if you want something like taro or red bean, you may be paying well over three dollars. So I was elated when I discovered City Café in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, which offers a long list of bubble tea flavors for only two dollars. I ordered the black milk tea, thinking it was best to try out the basics at a new place before venturing into more complicated flavors. City Café’s version tasted extremely creamy; it was probably made with half and half or even some condensed milk. Its sweetness balanced nicely with the aromatic quality of the black tea. It was refreshing, but definitely sugary enough to serve as dessert. Most importantly, it was not overwhelmed by ice (a major pet peeve).

Brooklyn’s Chinatown in Sunset Park consists of a strip of 8th Avenue between 42nd and 61st Streets. Though it’s much smaller than Manhattan’s Chinatown, it can get very busy at certain times of the day, and the bustle is due more to locals going about their daily activities than hordes of tourists looking for handbags. The avenue is lined with produce stalls, and exciting fruits like lychees, starfruit, and durian are all easy to find. I bought a bunch of lychees with their stems still attached, and the collection of spiky globes looked like some kind of beautiful alien bouquet. The strip culminates at 61st street with the Hong Kong Supermarket, a comprehensive source of Asian specialty foods. For fresh groceries, Chinese snacks, and the added bonus of reasonably priced bubble tea, 8th Avenue in Sunset Park is certainly worth the trip. And if, unlike me, you’re not crazy enough to walk the 9.5-mile roundtrip journey from Park Slope, the N and R trains both stop nearby.

Places I've Been Meaning to Try: Kombit

I’ve often left restaurants with a to-go box filled with something too filling to finish in one sitting but too delicious to leave behind. Last night was the first time I’ve left a restaurant with a raw specimen of the main ingredient of a dish I’d ordered, and instructions on how to prepare it. But this gift was only one of the many delights that comprised my dinner at Kombit, a Haitian restaurant in Prospect Heights.

Kombit is just a few doors down from my apartment, and for months I’d been passing it and occasionally stopping to look at the menu to attempt pronunciation of the exotic Creole names, and to ponder ways to fit the Lambi (conch simmered in tomato) or Goat Tasso (fried chunks of marinated goat meat) into my starving-student budget. So when it came to choosing a place for a family dinner after my college graduation – it needed to be a place I had wanted to try out for a while, but one that was representative of the neighborhood and something that my parents (maybe) wouldn’t find at home in Berkeley – Kombit was the logical answer.

While waiting for our parents who were lagging behind, my sister and I decided to order drinks. Kombit has an impressive list of cocktails, but I chose a glass of Malta, a Carribean soda made of barley, hops, and water. I had heard it tasted like beer (which makes sense given the ingredients), but it reminded me of the instant Horlicks my mother used to make, with the creaminess of milk replaced by the refreshing zing of carbonation. My sister ordered Jus Corosol, made from the soursop fruit, which despite its name, as a waiter pointed out to us, is far from sour. It has a mildly sweet taste that seems to combine pineapple, guava, banana – basically every tropical fruit you can think of.

When it came to ordering, our waitress ascertained our unfamiliarity with the Haitian cuisine pretty quickly, and helpfully started constructing a meal for us according to our preferences. One question had to be answered first: “Are you hungry, or hungry-hungry?” Based on our responses, and taking my sister’s vegetarianism into account, we decided to start with Fritai Lakai (assorted fried root vegetables, including plantains and sweet potatoes), Akra, a traditional appetizer made of yautia, a staple root vegetable in West Indian cuisine, which is pureed and fried to resemble something like large tater tots. It is served with a spicy cabbage slaw whose freshness perfectly balances the decadent satisfaction of perfectly crisp-fried root vegetable.

The more we munched on the fritters, however, the more we wondered about the nature of the particular vegetable that composed them. The menu mentioned that yautia is also called “edo” on some islands in the West Indies, but neither name sounded familiar. We eventually asked our waitress if she could describe the vegetable, but she had a better plan: she reappeared from the kitchen a few moments later with a raw, unscrubbed yautia tuber rolling around on a small plate. She explained the tedious process of removing the tiny hairs that sprout from its thin dark brown skin, and how to make the white flesh into a pulp in a food processor. It sounded like quite an undertaking. “We like to say that a lot of love goes into Haitian cooking,” she said, “but it’s a lot of work.”

The tuber was placed off to the side when our main dishes arrived: Legume San Viand (stewed vegetables with rice and beans), Legume Bef (vegetables with beef, rice, and beans) and Rara salad (beets, corn, and other vegetables in a creamy dressing). Once again our waitress was on hand to demonstrate the best way to eat rice and beans: make a flat bead of rice on your plate, scoop some stewed vegetables on top, and spoon bean puree over the whole thing. Make sure to get some of each component on each forkful. This is an excellent method in my book, but the stew was delicious on its own, too – its subtle spice and the way the flavors of the cabbage, carrots, and lima beans had melted together was obviously a product of slow and laborious Haitian-style cooking.

As we left the restaurant, I was ready to book a flight to any tropical country where I could sip Jus Corosol and enjoy a slower pace of life, and of course the effects this has on cooking. But knowing that this was probably not going to happen, I was comforted by the bag in my hand, full of leftover plantains and the raw yautia, waiting to be cooked with the container of spice mix that our waitress had generously included. Plus, while the West Indies are a little far, Kombit is still down the street, and I have to go back to try the Goat Tasso.