A perfect bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich is an American classic, five ingredients in perfect harmony.A good theme when creating a great BLT: more is better! More bacon, more mayo, more lettuce. Bread perfectly toasted, lettuce crisp, tomato sliced thin. It's a return to childhood, a happy dream. Let's walk through the ingredients one by one.
Before we shared Bodrum's artichoke pizza, layered generously with thin artichoke slices, and the small, refreshing shepherd’s salad ($8.50), Miss Mingle and I chose a sweet and savory b’stila djej ($7.50). Confectioners sugar dusts three plump triangular pillows of phyllo dough, but you bite in to find a unique, addicting concoction of chopped chicken, almonds, herbs and cinnamon. Truly the most interesting mezze on the menu, which includes favorites like babaganoush, sigara borek, labne and Turkish patlican.
It's always a bonus for me when the Chef buys a little more than a pound of salmon and our daughter announces she's not showing up for dinner. I know I'll have just enough the next day to layer on a ciabatta. Here are recipes for salmon three ways--seared, baked, and poached--favorites from the Chef to use in your own salmon sammie the next day....
This week I'm giving the gut a break, so I thought I'd put up some "oldies but goodies," food columns from when I first started Snack Attack at the West Side Spirit. It was a wonderfully fun gig, eating snacks and writing them up in 200 word columns every week for four years. The discipline of the 200 word count is something I miss now that I've moved online. I am prone to ramble (have you noticed?).
I’d eat this jianbing if it contained a piece of paper. It was that good. Any vegetable matter comes to you in the crepe batter (made in part from mung bean flour), which has a greenish cast, a slightly musky taste and is a thing of beauty. Bits of cilantro, scallion and also sesame seeds swirl within folds of yellow and white eggy pancake to create a pattern you might be happy to wear on a scarf. In fact wrap this around my neck, and I’ll eat my way through it
Corrado Bread and Pastry is a busy, welcoming spot in the East 70s, catering to ladies who lunch and school girls in pleated uniform mini skirts. I like many things about it: the outside dining area, the fact that, tiny as it is, it has a bathroom, that, in an area with the highest concentration of billionaires in the city, its prices are miraculously low, especially for ritzy items like prosciutto wrapped focaccia sticks ($2.75) or mini pepper brioches stuffed with chicken and basil or tuna and watercress ($3.50).
From the sublime to the sublimely ridiculous: looking out from the viewing deck of the grand Oratoire Saint Jospeph du Mont Royal, I saw the giant orange orb beckoning in the distance. The retro fast food Gibeau Orange Julep looked like one of the remnants of Expo 67 strewn around Montreal, which we have come to know through three years of visits to our son, a McGill University student. We had walked five miles and it would be another three miles to reach Orange Julep along a bleak stretch of the Décairie Expressway.