Live Blogging Dinner, Part 2

Now, this place shows promise: Lac Viet Bistro, not far from that last horror show I wrote about. The place smells right. Mostly Asians in here, too, and the place is crowded at 5 PM. The menu unashamedly puts Vietnamese first, English translations second. And the muzac sucks. All good signs.

I’ve been here 15 minutes and they still haven’t taken my order, but good service and good food do not necessarily correlate. Oh, good — order taken, and the waiter didn’t speak English well enough to answer my question. This is going to be great!

I ordered “shrimp and grilled pork rice paper rolls,” which is grouped with cuon but has a different name (tom thit nuong). For a main course, I’ve ordered Lac Viet Dac Biet (it rhymes!) which is crispy shrimp cake, egg roll, grilled meatballs, grilled grounded shrimp on sugar cane served w/ vermicelli noodle, lettuce, mints & fish sauce. That’s verbatim.

There’s a white chick at a nearby table talking loudly about her out of body experience. I’ll try not to hold that against the place.

This afternoon, I went to Gatorland, and yes, Corn Dog m’dear, I had some gator ribs and deep fried pickles (because you can get onion rings and jalapeno poppers anywhere, but only a Southerner would deep fry a pickle). Gator tasted like pork, but was greasier, and had all manner of narrow, pale yellow cartlage ribs running through the meat. The anatomy reminded me of skate — tasty critter, but you need to overcome the conviction that you’re eating an Alien face-sucker.

As for Gatorland, I may be outgrowing the place. By the time I turn sixty, I’ll have certainly outgrown the place.

Food’s here and WOW. Wish I had a camera.

Stay tuned. Gotta fress.

I’m back. They forgot my appetizer but I don’t care. Dinner was enormous (and delicious). The grilled meats were yummy, and really, the only imperfect item was this fried, shredded sweet potato thing. Otherwise, yay! at least I can say I had one good meal in Orlando.

D.

Live Blogging Dinner

I’m at Straub’s Seafood in Orlando, a place I drove 40 min to get to since they promised me their clams are flown in from New England. We Shall See. It’s a noisy, lively joint, smoke-free — and when did the South discover smoke-free eateries? I like this change.

Pedestrian Caesar salad (no anchovies), and the dinner roll was oh-so-easy to skip. And I’m a pushover for bread, particularly on vacation. So far, to quote my high school math teacher Mr. Smith, “Ah am underwhelmed.”

If the seafood rawks, all will be forgiven.

Ugh. The seafood is like the dinner roll: not worth the calories. I ordered a platter with a small lobster tail, one crab cake, and fried clams. The lobster tastes like a bad mussel, the crab cake smacks of frozen and thawed crab, and, most depressing of all, Mrs. Paul’s clams have more flavor.

I’d head over to Little Saigon (the sign out front says they’re rated in Zagat) but I’m not sure I have an appetite. Maybe I’ll just hit that mall I saw on my way over here.

Stay tuned.

Okay, so get this:she asked me if I wanted a box, but no comment re my mostly uneaten dinner! Guee they get that a lot.

I’m back. It was just past 9 when I left that joint, so I drove back to the hotel, then walked around until I could find some company.

Bombay Sapphire company, to be precise. No sense letting the evening go completely to waste.

Good night!

D.

Oxtail stew

Did you ask for it? No! Are you getting it? Yes!
My oxtail stew recipe* . . .

Why oxtail stew, you ask? Assuming you don’t object to red meat (sorry, Shaina), it’s delicious. Unlike beef, oxtails retain their flavor even after long cooking, so it’s an ideal crockpot or overnight stew. Indeed, you can’t rush oxtail stew.

It’s a cheaper version of ossobuco and every bit as good. Since I can’t often find veal shanks in our grocery store, this is the closest I can get to ossobuco.

You’ll want two good-sized oxtail pieces for each adult. Look for large-diameter, meaty, close-to-the-butthole pieces (because that’s where it’s most flavorful!) You’ll use the little pieces, too; not so much for the meat, but they do add flavor to the stew.

Preheat oven — anywhere from 275F to 350F, depending on how long you plan on letting it cook. Low heat/slow cook is best. Typically, I’ll set it up in the early afternoon and cook it at least four hours, maybe five, at 300 to 325F. At 350F, I suspect it would still take at least 3 hours for the oxtails to become tender.

Sprinkle the oxtail pieces with salt and pepper, then lightly dust with flour. In a Dutch oven, brown the pieces in olive oil on all sides. If you do this over medium to medium-high heat, the flour and oil will form a little roux at the bottom of the Dutch oven. Save this. If the heat gets too high, the roux will burn. Don’t save this. So: great if you can manage to get that little bit of roux, but don’t stress out if it burns. Just throw it away and use fresh vegetable oil for your vegies.

That’s the next step. Once you’ve browned the oxtails, set them aside and saute some vegies. I like a traditional mirepoix of yellow onions, carrots, and celery, but I also add chopped button mushrooms or portabellas. Dice them all quite fine. Chop up some garlic cloves while you’re at it, but add them only after you’ve sauteed the vegies. Continue sauteeing until fragrant. In other words, don’t burn the damned garlic.

Add a cup of a full-bodied red wine. Boil off the alcohol. Add the browned oxtails. In honor of George W. Bush’s all-time-low approval rating, add a 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes (I like S&W) on top of the oxtails. Add a bit of salt and pepper (you can always add more later) and shove a few bay leaves down, down, down deep into the stew. I also add about a half-teaspoon of dry thyme and a good pinch of oregano.

Heat to a simmer. Put the lid on. Shove it into the oven and cook the crap out of it.

By the way: the liquid in the stew ought to come close to the top surface of the oxtails. Add some stock if necessary — chicken, beef, vegetable, doesn’t matter what kind of stock.

After the stew has been cooking at least three or four hours, take it out of the oven. Taste one of the oxtails: the meat should pull away from the gristle and melt in your mouth. If it’s tough, you haven’t cooked it long enough. This dish tastes better the next day, so you have no excuse to undercook it.

Stir well, flipping the tails. Now taste the stewy part. (You might need to spoon away some of the fat.) Adjust for salt and pepper. You can add some lemon zest, chopped Italian parsley, and chopped fresh garlic if the stew tastes too bland, but that is usually not a problem.

Serve with crusty French bread. Questions? (If you’ve never eaten oxtails, you’ll soon be asking: Now, how the hell do I eat one of these? But it ain’t that tough. The meat should peel away from the gristle with little effort. If it doesn’t, it’s undercooked.)

D.

*Old-timers here knows what it means when I’m posting recipes. Means I’m bone tired, too tired to do anything truly creative. Sorry, Corn Dog, the ant post will have to wait.

Yummy eggplant thingy, AKA involtini

Tonight, I tried to reproduce an eggplant dish I had in San Francisco at Ti Piacera. Involtini, it’s called: thinly sliced eggplant rolled around a cheesy filling, broiled and served with a red sauce. My verdict: not bad. Certainly worthy for company. Not easy, but what the hell.

The eggplant

Peel the sucker and slice it thinly (1/8 inch or so) from top to bottom — lengthwise, not crosswise. Salt the slices and let them drain for at least 30 minutes. Rinse off the salty sweat and drain on paper towels.

The red sauce

Leftovers from last night’s ravioli: one big can of chopped tomatoes, a sauteed onion, couple cloves of garlic, crushed, pepper, olive oil, a dash of fish sauce. Simmer a good long time.

The filling

Also a leftover from last night’s ravioli. I sauteed about a pound of baby spinach in butter and, when wilted, I let it drain. In a food processor, I placed the spinach, salt, pepper, about 1/2 cup of ricotta cheese, another 1/2 cup of parmigiano reggiano, some grated fresh asiago, some nutmeg, and two egg yolks. Process until smooth.

The preparation

Saute the eggplant slices and drain on paper towels.

At one end of each slice, place a rounded teaspoonful of filling, a bit of mozarella cheese (roughly 1 – 2 teaspoons), a bit of fresh basil. Roll it up.

Arrange the rolls in a greased baking dish and bake at 250F until thoroughly heated — about 30 min. Then broil until slightly brown on top.

Spoon red sauce over the top. Sprinkle with finely chopped fresh basil.

Hey, you know what we haven’t done in a while?

Recipe requests. Got any?

D.

Pierogi: your results may vary . . .

Sometimes a guy has to get ethnic.

Polish pot stickers, Russian raviolis, Slavic won tons . . . call ’em what you will, pierogis are yummy. Yum. Me. So on Sunday, I got busy and spent all afternoon futzing around with filling and dough, folding my little semicircles, browning onions in butter for the sauce, serving them up, and for what?

Karen: Interesting.

Jake: I don’t hate them. (Or the equivalent.)

But I got back at them today. I made a Shepherd’s Pie from the leftover filling (recipe below) and they loved it. Or, Jake loved it, and Karen would have loved it if she weren’t feeling so crappy. Crappy or not, she finished her serving, so that says something.

Needless to say, you can skip the rather difficult pierogi project and jump straight to the easier (and, at least with my family, far more successful) Shepherd’s Pie.

First the pierogi . . .

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