Food! And Lots Of It!
Ok, after a month of crazy work time with lots of fun stuff and awesome stuff and crazy stuff (got a pic with the President, met Kal Penn for official business, and chilled with awesome folks from the Pacific), I needed to do something fun and relaxing. And rest assured, the New Yord Food And Wine Festival, sponsored by the Food Network, served that need more than adequately by providing exactly what its name implied, in great quantities. Far be it from me to pass up Food and/or Wine, and so there we go.
Let's be frank: I like to eat, but cooking is not one of my strong points. In fact, it may be my least strong point of all. So when it comes to the Food Network, mostly involving people talking about how to make food, my eyes glaze over and I ask the quintessential question, "But where has the food gone?"
So of course the food festival is a great way to wander around and taste a lot of samples of food prepared by good chefs and restaurants and the like. Chocolate and cheese, meat and seafood, veggies, dips, chips, crackers, salads, pastas, you name it, it's there, and it is delicious. This is the fourth year I've encountered this festival, and I leave it stuffed to the gills every single time. As a bonus, there is the "wine" part, in which dozens of wineries and distilleries offer samples of their wares, so washing the infinite food down with infinite drink leads to infinite happiness.
This year, however, we tried out some of the seminars, just to be different. Let's see what Alton Brown had to say...
"Ok. It's eleven o'clock. Let's start with some wine." *pours self and assistant some wine* *chugs entire glass of wine*
He then proceeded to show how to use a drill and a ceiling hook as a makeshift corkscrew. Also, how to cool wine faster when you really really need to drink right now. Remember: let your kids hold the drill. It's what they're good for.
Alton: "You know how after a party you always have all these open half-empty bottles of wine lying around?"
Me: "What kind of party have you been going to?"
Then he showed how to make port bubbles, similar to tapioca tea balls, only with port and gelatin. They sounded delicious and looked crazy awesome. Even I wanted port balls after that.
Finally, he showed us how to use a saber to open a champagne bottle. Why? Because "everyone has a saber around somewhere." He made sure his assistant was there to catch the cork. She had safety goggles and a catcher's mitt. The cork hit her in the nards. Gonna call that a win for Alton Brown.
Later, there was a seminar on meat. No, not just any seminar on meat. No indeed. Dr. Bass had a PhD in Meat Science, and he and another chef were there with an enormous chunk of cow, which they promptly disected into its component meat parts. As Dr. Bass cut apart the enormous hock of meat, he would pass the cuts on to the chef, who would cook them on the spot and then pass the cuts around to the audience to sample. It was the singlehandedly least vegetarian-friendly seminar one could possibly imagine. It was also delicious. We found where sirloin and tritip came from, and what Certified Angus really means, and much more. Also, can't stress it enough, enormous hock of raw cow.
Finally, Iron Chef Morimoto gave a seminar on what to do with crabs. Morimoto's English isn't so hot, but he had funny shorts on, so that pretty much made up for it. He started off talking about cooking and how he had 45 minutes to do an hour's worth of cooking. He had been preceded by someone named Mike Symon, who looked like he'd take 3rd place in a Vin Diesel lookalike contest. (2nd place would be Vin Diesel himself, and first place of course goes to Chuck Norris.) That's mostly irrelevant, though.
He says most of his restaurants do sushi type things, and he wasn't going to do that for us. He had something more complicated in mind. He picked up a crab from the box of crabs that had been brought out. It pinched him and he dropped it back in the box.
At this point in the seminar, Morimoto reverted back to one of his ancestors, likely a samurai working for Shogun Nobunaga, and grabbed another crab. CHOP! went his knife. "Hai! No craw!" he shouted, because he's Japanese and cannot say the letter L. The crab's claw flew off. CHOP AGAIN! "No craw!" The second claw separated. "Now you take out this part," he continued, sticking his thumb into the base of the crab's [my knowledge of crab anatomy is about zero, so I'll just say "nards" because it's funnier] nards, pulls it out with a crunch that really carries over his headset mike, and then he separates the crab's shell, top from bottom, with a louder crunch.
The more squeamish members of the audience were, needless to say, easily visible at this point. Bonus for whoever shouted "oh my god, its legs are still moving!" Because, really, they were.
Crab number two suffered a similar fate. It had the extra misfortune of being chopped down the middle after the shell separation. Crab number three fared no better. CHOP! "No craw!" CHOP! "No craw!" RIP! CRUNCH! CHOP! "Mike Symon!"
All the crab bits- shell, meat and all- were then pulverized into juicy bits and soaked in broth to add flavor.
Shogun Morimoto continued his crab carnage throughout the seminar, making a variety of delicious looking dishes that were the product of mass murder. I've never wanted to eat seafood so badly in my life. Maybe that was the wine talking, though. The highlight was a salty broth of crab flavored soup (?) with crab fragments in it, some of which were STILL MOVING AND TRYING TO FLEE.
Iron Chef Morimoto is now my culinary hero. Let the killing begin!
Let's be frank: I like to eat, but cooking is not one of my strong points. In fact, it may be my least strong point of all. So when it comes to the Food Network, mostly involving people talking about how to make food, my eyes glaze over and I ask the quintessential question, "But where has the food gone?"
So of course the food festival is a great way to wander around and taste a lot of samples of food prepared by good chefs and restaurants and the like. Chocolate and cheese, meat and seafood, veggies, dips, chips, crackers, salads, pastas, you name it, it's there, and it is delicious. This is the fourth year I've encountered this festival, and I leave it stuffed to the gills every single time. As a bonus, there is the "wine" part, in which dozens of wineries and distilleries offer samples of their wares, so washing the infinite food down with infinite drink leads to infinite happiness.
This year, however, we tried out some of the seminars, just to be different. Let's see what Alton Brown had to say...
"Ok. It's eleven o'clock. Let's start with some wine." *pours self and assistant some wine* *chugs entire glass of wine*
He then proceeded to show how to use a drill and a ceiling hook as a makeshift corkscrew. Also, how to cool wine faster when you really really need to drink right now. Remember: let your kids hold the drill. It's what they're good for.
Alton: "You know how after a party you always have all these open half-empty bottles of wine lying around?"
Me: "What kind of party have you been going to?"
Then he showed how to make port bubbles, similar to tapioca tea balls, only with port and gelatin. They sounded delicious and looked crazy awesome. Even I wanted port balls after that.
Finally, he showed us how to use a saber to open a champagne bottle. Why? Because "everyone has a saber around somewhere." He made sure his assistant was there to catch the cork. She had safety goggles and a catcher's mitt. The cork hit her in the nards. Gonna call that a win for Alton Brown.
Later, there was a seminar on meat. No, not just any seminar on meat. No indeed. Dr. Bass had a PhD in Meat Science, and he and another chef were there with an enormous chunk of cow, which they promptly disected into its component meat parts. As Dr. Bass cut apart the enormous hock of meat, he would pass the cuts on to the chef, who would cook them on the spot and then pass the cuts around to the audience to sample. It was the singlehandedly least vegetarian-friendly seminar one could possibly imagine. It was also delicious. We found where sirloin and tritip came from, and what Certified Angus really means, and much more. Also, can't stress it enough, enormous hock of raw cow.
Finally, Iron Chef Morimoto gave a seminar on what to do with crabs. Morimoto's English isn't so hot, but he had funny shorts on, so that pretty much made up for it. He started off talking about cooking and how he had 45 minutes to do an hour's worth of cooking. He had been preceded by someone named Mike Symon, who looked like he'd take 3rd place in a Vin Diesel lookalike contest. (2nd place would be Vin Diesel himself, and first place of course goes to Chuck Norris.) That's mostly irrelevant, though.
He says most of his restaurants do sushi type things, and he wasn't going to do that for us. He had something more complicated in mind. He picked up a crab from the box of crabs that had been brought out. It pinched him and he dropped it back in the box.
At this point in the seminar, Morimoto reverted back to one of his ancestors, likely a samurai working for Shogun Nobunaga, and grabbed another crab. CHOP! went his knife. "Hai! No craw!" he shouted, because he's Japanese and cannot say the letter L. The crab's claw flew off. CHOP AGAIN! "No craw!" The second claw separated. "Now you take out this part," he continued, sticking his thumb into the base of the crab's [my knowledge of crab anatomy is about zero, so I'll just say "nards" because it's funnier] nards, pulls it out with a crunch that really carries over his headset mike, and then he separates the crab's shell, top from bottom, with a louder crunch.
The more squeamish members of the audience were, needless to say, easily visible at this point. Bonus for whoever shouted "oh my god, its legs are still moving!" Because, really, they were.
Crab number two suffered a similar fate. It had the extra misfortune of being chopped down the middle after the shell separation. Crab number three fared no better. CHOP! "No craw!" CHOP! "No craw!" RIP! CRUNCH! CHOP! "Mike Symon!"
All the crab bits- shell, meat and all- were then pulverized into juicy bits and soaked in broth to add flavor.
Shogun Morimoto continued his crab carnage throughout the seminar, making a variety of delicious looking dishes that were the product of mass murder. I've never wanted to eat seafood so badly in my life. Maybe that was the wine talking, though. The highlight was a salty broth of crab flavored soup (?) with crab fragments in it, some of which were STILL MOVING AND TRYING TO FLEE.
Iron Chef Morimoto is now my culinary hero. Let the killing begin!